After 13 Years, ‘Obamacare’ Offers Broken Promises and Costly Consequences

An Obamacare sign is seen on the UniVista Insurance company office in Miami on Dec. 15, 2015. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A review of former President Barack Obama’s health care law 13 years after its adoption shows a history of broken promises and costly consequences.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—more commonly known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare”—was signed into law by Obama on March 23, 2010.

Among the many promises Obama made as he pitched his program to the American people was one he repeated in one iteration or another no less than 37 times, Politifact reported.

U.S. President Barack Obama is interviewed by Vox at the Blair House in Washington on Jan. 6, 2017. The president discussed the future of Obamacare during a livestreamed broadcast. Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images

“Under our proposals, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period, end of story,” Obama said during a presidential weekly address in 2009.

After three years of data consistently proving that millions of Americans were losing their insurance and their doctors, Obama attempted to rewrite the promise, claiming during a Nov. 4, 2013, speech to Organizing for Action, “What we said was you can keep [your plan] if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

It was a revision that even the left-leaning PolitiFact rated as “Pants On Fire“ in its fact check.

Another promise Obama made about his health care program was that it would save the average American family about $2,500 per year in health care costs. In reality, data compiled by The Heritage Foundation in 2021 showed that ACA mandates and regulations more than doubled the cost of insurance between 2013 and 2019, with a national average premium increase of 129 percent.

According to a Department of Health and Human Services report released on Oct. 26, 2022, the average monthly premium for the benchmark silver plan in 2023 will—according to CNN’s calculations—rise by 4 percent in the 33 states that participate in the program.

However, because congressional Democrats extended the ACA subsidies through 2025 with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Aug. 16, 2022, most Americans won’t feel the increase.

More People Insured—on Medicaid

Although supporters of the ACA have touted its success by saying more Americans than ever have health insurance coverage, most of the gains are attributed to an increase in Medicaid enrollment.

John Goodman, president of the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research, wrote in Forbes that the increase in Medicaid enrollment also includes the millions of people who enrolled in the program illegally because of lax oversight, costing billions of dollars in fraudulent payments.

Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), told The Epoch Times that “the high cost of Obamacare premiums has forced those who can’t afford it to make one of two choices—Obamacare subsidies or Medicaid.”

Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. Courtesy of Hayden Dublois

Dublois explained that “the Medicaid expansion component of Obamacare allows able-bodied adults in expansion states, those aged 18 to 64 who are under or at 138 percent of the poverty level, to sign up for Medicaid,” which is jointly funded by states and the federal government.

In December 2022, the FGA predicted that enrollment in Medicaid would reach “100 million individuals” by mid-March. They weren’t far off. On March 30, the FGA’s data dashboard showed that a total of 98.6 million people had become part of the taxpayer-funded welfare program.

In February, Dublois wrote that Medicaid expansion was “supposed to be a silver bullet for hospitals.” It was also supposed to be good for “hospitals’ financial health” and “create thousands of new jobs.”

In reality, he confirmed that nearly 50 hospitals have been forced to close in expansion states since 2014, reducing the number of places where people could access health care and eliminating the jobs of every person those hospitals employed.

Dublois said his research also suggests that “expanding Medicaid into hold-out states would add well over 10 million more Americans to Medicaid welfare”—all of whom would be able-bodied adults—at a cost of “$600 billion to $700 billion” to federal and state taxpayers over the next decade.

“We are at a point in this country where we just hit nearly 100 million Americans on Medicaid nationwide, the highest it has ever been,” he said. “In a country of approximately 330 million Americans, that’s almost a third of our population. It’s never been like that.”

The ‘Roadmap’

“Since Obamacare was enacted, and deemed constitutional by a divided Supreme Court, the political weaponization of healthcare has accelerated,” the Right to Life League wrote in a March 29 post on its website, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) “draconian vaccine mandates forced a national lockdown in the name of healthcare, costing millions of Americans their jobs, and negatively impacting millions of American children.”

The post goes on to assert that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) used “heavy-handed governmental mandates” to exert control over the population.

“With the COVID-19 emergency declarations set to end on May 11th, the Biden Administration is seeking a new and improved health crisis to maintain extraordinary federal power over the states via a public health ‘emergency’ on abortion access,” the post reads.

Right to Life League Vice President of Legal Affairs Susan Swift. Courtesy of Susan Swift

Considering all of this, Susan Swift, vice president of legal affairs for the Right to Life League, told The Epoch Times that “Obamacare has been widely successful” in at least one respect.

“Obamacare is the granddaddy of an intentional federal takeover of private health care in America,” she said.

Citing the expansion of government power during the COVID-19 pandemic—with the CDC, HHS, and the National Institutes of Health imposing business lockdowns, school closures, social distancing protocols, forced masking, and vaccine mandates—Swift said the ACA provided a tried and tested “roadmap for states and the government” to follow on how to “tyrannically jam all kinds of legislation and funding down the throats of Americans by calling it a form of health care.”

“Nowhere is that more prevalent than in California in the abortion industry,” she said. “Thanks to Alan Guttmacher, who invented the idea that abortion is a form of health care, California legislators are learning how to mandate public policy and how to fund it with taxpayer dollars by using the term ‘health care’ and by saying pregnancy is somehow a threat to a woman’s health.”

Dublois said: “I think it’s an accurate statement to say Obamacare has been a critical component of the federal government’s takeover of health care as Medicaid. While Bernie Sanders advocated for Medicare for all, what we are actually seeing is Medicaid for all.”

Biden celebrated the anniversary of the ACA during a March 23 White House speech, wherein he touted the program as an “extraordinary achievement.”

“The Affordable Care Act has been law for 13 years,” he said. “It has developed deep roots in this country. It has become a critical part of providing health care and saving lives. We always talk about the costs, but it saves lives as well.”

Dublois sees things differently: “In reality, Obamacare shepherded nearly 20 million more Americans onto welfare.”